Wide open. It didn't take China long to respond to Clinton's call to tear down the Great Firewall. China's official news agency Xinhua summed up the government response in its headline: "China urges US to stop accusations on so-called Internet freedom."

Why "so-called"? Because the Chinese Internet is open. Wide open.

"China urged the United States to respect facts and stop unreasonable accusations on China in the name of so-called Internet freedom," said the article. It then quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson as saying, "The US side had criticized China's policies on Internet administration, alluding that China restricts Internet freedom. We firmly oppose such words and deeds, which were against the facts and would harm the China-US relations."

It's constitutional. The Chinese constitution protects freedom of speech, he added—which it does, along with freedom of the press, of association, of religion, of demonstration, and freedom to criticize the government. The constitution also notes that "work is the glorious duty of every able-bodied citizen."

Those rights come with some terrific caveats, though. Religion is fine unless it could "disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state." Privacy is an absolute right except when it's not, such as when "public security or procuratorial organs are permitted to censor correspondence in accordance with procedures prescribed by law." Etc.

China insists that its restrictions are all written into law, however, and are therefore legal, which in turn means that they are a simple matter of cultural difference, and foreigners should just stop talking about them and start complying with them. The reality, as most Internet companies have found, is that censorship can be random, and even major companies never know when Internet services will be blocked and when they won't.

Hillary Clinton making her speech at the Newseum

The company you keep. Journalist James Fallows, just back from three years living in China, was in the audience for Clinton's speech. He notes: "Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Egypt—this is not the grouping of countries that the Chinese government, in its recent sense of rise to superpower status, is used to being lumped with.

"Compared to the US as a financial power, OK; overtaking Japan in economic size, yes; being a crucial player in environmental negotiations... all that is one thing. Bracketed in the same sentence with Tunisia and Uzbekistan is different. Sentences like this don't appear in formal, big-deal SecState addresses by accident."

No exceptions for Google. On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu discussed the related Google issue during a press conference... and made it quite clear the government was not ready to open up further at the moment.

"I wish to stress that Internet in China is open and China supervises Internet according to law," he said. "The Chinese Government encourages the development and application of Internet. China is the country with the largest number of Internet users. Hacking activities in whatever form is strictly prohibited by China's laws. Foreign-invested enterprises in China should abide by China's laws and regulations, respect the interests, culture and traditions of the general public, and assume the corresponding social responsibilities. Google is no exception. China firmly adheres to the policy of opening up and will continue its effort to create a sound environment for foreign enterprises in China including Internet corporations and ensure their legitimate rights and interests."

We hate hacking, too. Ma also stressed that China itself was a victim of hacking. "It's fair to say that China is the biggest victim of hacking," he added. "In China, eight out of ten computers connected with Internet are once hijacked by hackers."

That number, if true, makes the mind boggle when it ponders the size of the botnets that must exist using those machines.

What no one seems to be saying officially is that, while China's government may in fact be linked to the super-sophisticated attacks on Google and 30 other companies, it's inconceivable that US spooks aren't engaged in a similar exercise—though the goal of such work may well be different.

Obama wants answers. A day after Clinton's speech, Obama made clear that his Secretary of State wasn't "going rogue" by being too direct with countries like China. Obama spokesperson Bill Burton said today that his boss is "troubled" by the cyberattacks on Google and wants "answers" from the Chinese government.

Remove the plank from thine own eye! While most commentators seem to be praising Clinton's vision, plenty ask if the US actually lives up to the ideals it is setting for others. This mood is captured by bloggers like Chris Marsden, a University of Essex (UK) law professor, who writes:

So do we want the home of the NSA, the Patriot [sic] Act and most of the surveillance-intelligence complex lecturing the rest of us on free speech while licensing the flogging of blade servers and other DPI kit to friends, Romans and Chinamen? It's a point made robustly by Rebecca McKinnon and Ian Brown, who points out the nasties perpetrated by Yahoo! and Microsoft back in the day.

Watching Clinton in Baku. US embassies, like the one in Uzbekistan, are promoting Clinton's speech on their websites. In Azerbaijan, the embassy showed the speech and then hosted a discussion afterwards with Azerbaijani journalists.

Awkward questions. In Lebanon, the speech is the main item on the US embassy's website. But when the embassy organized its own discussion of the speech with local journalists, it found itself on the receiving end of questions involving freedom of expression.

The local issue is al-Manar TV, a station run by Hizbullah in Lebanon. The US considers Hizbullah a terrorist organization. Journalists wanted to know about a new bill (PDF) that just passed the US House of Representatives and targets al-Manar (along with al-Aqsa and al-Zawra, which are run by other groups such as Hamas) as "Specially Designated Global Terrorists satellite providers."

The local US public affairs officer stressed that the bill was not a law, that the Obama administration had no position on it yet, but that the US government doesn't see a difference between a designated terrorist group and that group's TV station.

As for al-Manar, last month the TV station railed against the bill. "Democracy and Freedom of Expression are two 'slogans' that have always been used by the United States in its "campaign" against the Arab world... Yet, democracy and freedom of expression seem to be just another American 'illusion' and 'fantasy.'"